Tribute to a Mayan named Mario

 Marcia Moston

The notation on the yellowing page in my Guatemala photo album reads: Dear Mario—a little goofy, a little blind, a lot loved. Mario (go figure a Mayan boy with the name Mario) latched onto us when we first arrived in his village in Guatemala many years ago.

Although he didn’t understand English, he always seemed to know when Bob was goofing and making up silly words. Mario stuck close to our daughter’s side and served as her protector when she went about the village or the home for orphans. My last memory of him as a boy was when he held the gate open for us, tears streaming down his face, as we drove out of the highland village of San Andres Sajcabaja for what we thought was the last time.

Last week Mario died in a bus accident in Quiche.

Getting Wrecked: Part II

Greetings from the fourth floor of the Hampton Inn and Suites overlooking the Reedy River in Greenville. My husband gave me a three-day stay here so I could write/pray/play or whatever I needed to do to welcome the New Year.

I felt a great deal of pressure the first day to use the time well and produce some spectacular product of divine inspiration, which has yet to take form. 

But today, as I released the striving and watched the sunrise, the word SPLENDOR swelled in my spirit: Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples . . . Splendor and majesty are before him. —Psalm 96.

Amen and Amen!

I am pleased to introduce someone who puts these words into action: Jeff Goins, blogger, storyteller, and stirrer of visions. He is the author of Wrecked, a book he describes as “a guide to growing up and learning to live in the tension between the next adventure and our daily commitments.”

Taking the call to action from his book to heart, Jeff is co-leading a mission trip in February to Guatemala, a country near and dear to my own heart, in February.  

Following is a continuation of an interview which you can see in the previous post. 

Jeff, how can people who are willing to do the hard things, get messy, and move into someone else’s pain, be at peace with their own comforts, lazy afternoons in the pool, or delights in beauty? Is there a place, a way of looking at the pain and still seeing beauty? 

Great question. I wish I could answer it. :) Most of us want to find a way to balance everything — our families, jobs, passions, etc. — but living a wrecked life isn't about balance. It's about managing tension.

Life is full of tension, warring desires and conflicts that pull at us from every angle. Sometimes, when both are good (like rest and action, for example), the answer is to live somewhere in the middle. To embrace the tension.Balance is about control. Tension is about faith. 

Can you care deeply about the pain of the world and still enjoy a day off? Of course. Should you? Probably. Do you need to have the exact ratio figured out? Not at all. Learn to live in the tension. The place to not live is on one extreme or the other; that doesn't seem very healthy or sustainable. 

Although assuaged by your quote from C.S. Lewis about not pursuing the thrill of an experience—letting it go and moving “through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow," I wonder if someone who has been undone at some time in their life by another’s pain, can ever let go of the longing, the incessant nagging to do more?

You're right, Marcia. You can't. It stays with you, haunts you. And that's what it means to be wrecked — you can't go back to who you were. 
The trick is to keep going, to let those experiences inform and shape your future without trying to relive them. 

You have had much experience and contact with missions, yet you are better known in cyberworld for your writing/social media expertise. Do you feel that writing a book like Wrecked is an unexpected departure for your followers?

I thought it might be, but honestly, few people struggled with it. This underscores a belief that I've held for awhile: we follow writers not just for their genres and topics, but for their voices and worldviews. That seems to be true in my case. 

Has having a child affected how you think about a wrecking experience?

Absolutely. I alluded to this at the end of the book, but since the birth of our son, those ideas of commitment and doing the hard thing have only been underscored.
Getting wrecked is about stepping into uncomfortable situations and realizing life is not about you. So far, parenthood has been the best way to learn this lesson for me.

                                                   *********

Thank you, Jeff, and thank you friends for stopping here. May you dare to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God and see what He will do.

Blessings,

Marcia

It Doesn't Look Good

Sometimes things look downright bleak.
Like the day five years ago when my husband first saw the house I had bought for us in SC. The yellow duct tape holding the door sills together was warning enough that the preretirement home his wife bought was about to wipe him out of time and money, and there was no turning back.

Other times—downright confusing—senseless even.
Like when we returned from Guatemala much sooner than we     planned:

" I wore the year following our return from Guatemala as though it were a lead apron on my chest. We moved back into our New Jersey home. Bob returned to his job in the electrical union, dutifully leaving at four a.m. for the daily commute to New York City two hours away. Lily donned baggy jeans and pre-teen concerns without missing a beat. The only apparent remnant of her foreign life was the long hair-wrap she had acquired that first day on a sidewalk in Antigua."                                                                                       

"The ripples from the boulder that had been tossed into my pond ebbed away, and life resumed as though it had never been interrupted—except for the vague depression, the persistent ennui, and loss of direction that dogged my every move—except for the knowledge that something big had displaced the waters of my life and was still there under the surface." –Call of a Coward

And in the worst of times—downright hopeless.
Like when we have no means within ourselves to carry on except to fold up to die. One of my favorite movie scenes to capture this absolute resignation is from The African Queen. Having exhausted every effort to free their boat from the mucky, reedy channel that entraps them, Rose and Charlie lie down to die.

Sometimes we too can’t see around the reedy bend in our river. We‘ve lost our view of the plans, possibilities, and purposes of God in our lives.We see only the Friday vision as our hero and hope dies bleeding on a cross, no different than the ones hanging next to him. What now? Who can save us?

But as the camera pulls back on the two figures huddled in the bottom of their boat, we see that the channel is really only feet away from the lake, which is hidden by the reeds. Unbeknownst to the sleeping two, rain begins to fall, the channel swells, and their little boat rises to freedom.

In Friday’s gloom, the disciples couldn’t see Sunday’s glory. But we know the impossible was possible. 

As I conclude this week’s photo journey from Call of a Coward, I pray you would be encouraged to fix your eyes on that Sunday vision—on that empty cross and abandoned tomb—on the Living One “who makes cowards courageous, ordinary lives purposeful, and dried-up dreams fruitful.”—Call of a Coward

first birthday cake

felicidad

town kids

Good Friday Sufferers

 

 

 

 

Vermont church

"....she looked me straight in the eye and ...asked, "Como esta?"

Finding the funny: Distance helps

Lake Atitlan and surrounding volcanoes

One of the writers in my critique group asked me why I didn’t talk with as much wit as I wrote with. Fairly certain she wasn’t calling me dull-witted, I took no offense.

Although her question triggered some group speculation about repressed personalities, alter egos, and writer’s persona, I suspect the answer lies more in the perspective of distance.

It’s much easier for those of us slow to find the funny when we are not in the midst of the family feud. It is easier to laugh when we are a safe distance from a fearful experience, or even a humiliating one.

This is particularly true when writing personal narrative. Personal stories like wine and cheese are better aged. Putting some distance between the event and the telling allows us to see from a wide-angled perspective the other factors involved that our on-the-scene emotions were incapable of absorbing.

In Call of a Coward, I related an incident when my husband was momentarily annoyed, angry with me for indulging in an expensive Dove ice cream. At the time, not even his attempted apology: “Marsh, you’re worth twelve Dove bars,” did much to appease the ruinous moment. But years later, (mind you, I didn’t harbor ill will that long!) it was easy to write about the incident. 

With the poignancy of perspective, I happily accept that I am worth more than twelve Dove bars.

Another time, while traveling an unfamiliar road in Guatemala, we were halted by road construction. A huge swath in the side of the mountain was blown open; its spewn boulders lay scattered in the road. A sign warned of the obvious danger, which not only entailed maneuvering around the rock slide that had already happened, but dodging the boulders that continued to plummet down as the road crews kept right on dynamiting.

No flagmen. No detour. No stop in blasting. Just pure guts, grit, and go Guatemala style. Choose the side with the two-hundred foot drop and oncoming cars or the one closest to the tumbling rocks and pray it’s not your day to die.

Those of you who have read my story know how I felt about traveling the roads there on a good day.

This wasn’t good.

I’m quite sure in the throes of fear, I muddied my prayers with things about primitive public safety and lack of common sense: “Can you believe this! You, don’t have to be a North American to know enough to have a flagman and stop blasting, for crying out loud.”

Once through, however, I looked out the rear window in wonderment. What fortitude these people had. Drive through a rock field while dodging boulders and oncoming traffic—no problem— just do whatever it was you had to do and get on with it.

Safe with five hundred feet between me and death, I thought it was pretty funny.

  

The perspective of distance.

How about you? Do you have a story that you find humorous now, but at one time was mortifying, horrifying, or petrifying?